Public Lab Research note

Sign up with

By signing up, you agree to the Code of Conduct, which applies to all online and in-person spaces managed by the Public Lab community and non-profit. You also agree to our Privacy Policy.

As an open source community, we believe in open licensing of content so that other members of the community can leverage your work legally -- with attribution, of course. By joining the Public Lab site, you agree to release the content you post here under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license, and the hardware designs you post under the CERN Open Hardware License 1.1 (full text). This has the added benefit that others must share their improvements in turn with you.

What I want to do

My attempt and results

The first thing I noticed is that it is minutely sensitive to its placement. It draws air in the side and out its bottom, and needs to be placed on a flat surface. Also, as the instructions mentioned, it didn't like direct sun. The measurements went up in sun.

There was a definite correlation between the rush of morning traffic and particulate levels. They would roughly double. But its also pretty cloudy in the morning, and I should really look at humidity too before making a judgement but... I don't have any software package that stands up to the CSV file produced by the speck. Excel, LibreOffice, both crapped out when I made a graph. So I'm going to visualize the data using this screenshot from a frozen LibreOffice.

I was hoping to present the dates out of their Unix time stamps and into a regular date format, but should've been faster at the screen captures.

Maybe I'll try again sometime with some other software.
here's the CSV file and the ODF spreadsheet with a column of human readable dates.

I couldn't get Excel to parse the time stamps either. I averaged every 60 particle counts, so I assume I got a number for every minute. Here is a graph from Excel for approximately the same time range as your graph above.
.

They sure are. Excel opened the ods file without too much trouble, and the timestamps are right there. I was just curious to look at the data. Don had the Speck running all day Sunday at the Barnraising, and it really responded to cooking bacon. Maybe he will parse the time stamps and send me the file.